engagement online

Ken Perlin's site and tools like the Visual Thesaurus are the types of interactive/exporatory software (can I use the term "game"? How about "play"?) that I'd like to fill the internet with. Perlin's stuff is the basis for the type of animation software that I'd like to see Pixar/Apple put out -- an Animation iLife app that does for animation what Garageband does with music creation/manipulation, and iMovie does with video.

Visual Thesaurus, on the other hand, simply adds a playful visual representation to the thesaurus, which is already (for me anyway) a really cool interactive book. The thesaurus, dictionary, encyclopedia, and even the Sear's catalog (and others I suppose), are all excellent examples of where tangible page-bound artifacts work very well to encourage interactivity. It would be great to get more of the accidental exploration-encouraging browsing in online stuff, although I guess search engines already do that to a certain extent. It seems like the limits of the bound book allow for a broader exploration, since unlike words are in close proximity to each other, whereas search engines offer a broad exploration within the same phrase -- this is the difference between 1 comment on 1000 words, and 1000 comments on 1 word. I'd like 1000 comments on 1000 words, and the accidental engagement with words/ideas that you hadn't planned on engaging, but happened upon.